How mobile releases really work, from the engineering managers and engineers behind them. Broken out by team size and release cadence.
These findings come from every engineering manager and engineer surveyed, across all team sizes and release cadences. For the numbers behind a team like yours, pick your segment above.
~5 hrs lost per release, on average. Engineers lose about five hours per release to manual steps, context switching and coordination. 37% lose six or more.
50% of teams with significant automation still lose 6 to 10 hours per release. Half of teams with significant automation investment still lose 6 to 10 hours per release to low-value work.
65% call the release process a significant or top source of frustration. Release coordination overhead is one of the causes they name most: the status updates, handoffs, approvals and chasing.
~27 people, each with a step to complete. Each of them has to approve, review, verify or run a step before the release goes live. For one EM in four, that number is above 30.
Only 1 in 8 can see it in one place. The rest piece it together from tools, conversations with the team, or by asking around.
86% of engineers say their team has no tool that centralizes release coordination; they use the project management tool (68%), chat (58%) and CI tracking (44%).
~5 months after joining before a new engineer runs a release alone. Fewer than 1% of EMs say it takes under three.
34% of engineers at 5,000+ person companies name an inefficient release process. We asked engineers: what's the greatest risk to your team's ability to scale?
#1 reason leadership cites: slipping timelines. Ahead of post-release quality, missed roadmap commitments and lack of visibility.
On average, engineers estimate 63% of their release incidents could have been prevented by a central, transparent release process.
94% of EMs who run releases say fixing them would speed up the roadmap. 88% of them also plan to invest in improving their release process in the next year.
Six measures across the six segments. The darker the cell, the higher the share.
EMs spending three or more hours per cycle on status updates
Every finding across all six segments, ready to pass along to your team.
